GLASGOW — It was Christmas, and Darren McGarvey was returning to his parents’ home after a long absence, drunk and disheveled, when his younger brother met him at the door.

His greeting was a punch in the face.

It was a bit surprising, Mr. McGarvey said, but understandable. “He wasn’t trying to fight me, he wasn’t trying to scare me. He was communicating something to me. He was saying, ‘You’ve hurt me. How dare you come down here? We’ve not seen you for how long, and you’re sitting drunk?’”

“I left there quite humbled,” he said. “That was one of the experiences that started making me more self-aware to how my behavior was impacting people.”

Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Scotland, gave him, he said in a recent interview, a greater understanding of violence than someone less exposed to chronic abuse and the threat of violence.

“Violence is like a language,” he said. “It can be offensive, and it can be vulgar and threatening. But it can be poetic, and sometimes it can be quite sublime.”

Mr. McGarvey, 34, a rapper who also goes by the name Loki, after the Norse god, has brought many such counterintuitive insights to his book, “Poverty Safari,” a part memoir, part treatise that recently won the Orwell Prize, Britain’s most prestigious award for political writing.

In it he describes his personal evolution, forced to cope with an alcoholic mother who died at 36 of cirrhosis. His earliest memory is of her dangling him out of a high-rise window. Another is of her sticking a serrated breadknife to his throat in an alcohol-fueled rage because he refused to go to bed. He was 5.

He was 16 when his mother died, and was living on the streets, before the punch from his brother. He overcame addiction and got into music, eventually becoming one of Scotland’s most prominent rappers and social commentators, earning enough fame to be invited on the BBC to talk about deprivation.

He assigned himself the role of “translating between the classes,” offering what he calls an “emotional reality” about deprivation that is rarely captured by statistics and demands an “emotional literacy” to be properly understood.

Based on the environment in which he was raised, he explores the anger, resentment and the sense of exclusion of the underclass, trying to explain what led voters to back Brexit and right-wing nationalism and populism.

“Often in communities like mine, or any community characterized as poor, the tropes associated with it are all about behaviors,” Mr. McGarvey said in a recent interview in a house in Pollok, the housing estate where he was raised. “I wanted to fill in the gaps and say, ‘Here’s what I think drives attitudes, behaviors and circumstances.’”

As inequality widens, he argues, assumptions about people on the other side of the divide become ever more entrenched. People have become so tribal that “politicians have little choice but to supply our demand for illusory quick fixes, oversimplified sound bites, scapegoats,” he said. “The biggest feature of the tribalism that comes to characterize our culture is the belief in the legitimacy of our resentments.”

In “Poverty Safari,” he describes how, in the violent milieu in which they are raised, children of the underclass become skillful emotional manipulators, intuiting their abusers’ needs and triggers. The eldest of five, Mr. McGarvey attributes his unusually high sense of self-awareness and keen observation to his “hyper-vigilance” as a child, living in fear of his mother, who herself was a victim of abuse and sexual assault.

He tries to make the pressures of deprivation relatable to the financially secure, bridging the gap between upper- and working-class realities: the chronic stress that spills into bingeing on booze and junk food; and the insidious belief that you are not smart enough or will never amount to anything, feelings that can manifest as aggressiveness.

He criticizes the left for being too wound up in righteous anger and obsessed with ideology, instead of trying to make practical differences to those who need help. The “poverty industry” run by the middle classes, he said, misunderstands deprivation because they are not part of it, however well-intentioned they are.

“This experiential reality of poverty has to inform how we deal with people,” he said. “We have to account for how people experience this society and the barriers.” The failure of the left to discuss issues like immigration, he says, has created a vacuum that is being filled by the far right.

At the same time, he rebukes himself and others like him for letting class resentments stop them from taking personal responsibility and confronting problems like addiction.

“I’d been raised to think that any anger I felt was legitimate, merely by virtue of the fact that I was lower-class,” he said. “But even if this were true, the anger itself was only useful when expressed at the correct moment, in the correct way.”

He fell in love with rap music and hip-hop when MTV arrived in Scotland in the 1990s. He started writing his own lyrics, drawing inspiration from Eminem.

Rap and hip-hop spoke to his experience, rather than what he was learning in school. “We spoke in low-status language, that those people thought was vulgar. Then hip-hop started being beamed into your living room. Not only are you seeing people who talk a similar sort of slang, but they have similar attitudes to the police, similar attitudes about the society they’re living in, similar experiences to violence,” he said. “That connects you, and for me that was powerful.”

One song by Eminem, “Role Model,” struck a particular chord. “Mother, are you there?” Eminem sings. “I love you, and I never meant to hit you over the head with that shovel.” It was the first time that he had heard someone making a joke about their own mother, Mr. McGarvey said.

In school, he was constantly taunted about his family problems. After listening to Eminem, he said, “I thought, ‘I’ll go on the offensive, I’ll be the one that makes jokes.’ Try to own it, at least.”

He published his first song when he was 15. “It was just a very basic biography of being young,” he said. “Just loving your mum, no matter what. Then recognizing something was wrong, and going through some of the adversity. Then the fourth verse was just about a resolution, and just trying to forgive.”

Where he once saw hatred in his mother’s eyes, he now sees “pain, trauma and a deep frustration at longing to feel connected but not knowing how.”

As he started getting attention through his music, he began to receive invitations from the BBC to appear on shows about poverty.

He wore a hoodie the first time he was invited to speak. Everyone else “was wearing blazers and glasses, and hair slicked back,” he recalled. “Then I quickly realized they’re asking me in here because they think I’m a ned,” he said, using a derogatory Scottish term for young men from deprived backgrounds.

“Once I realized that, I thought, ‘Right. O.K., cool. So when I go over here, I’ll wear a blazer and I’ll wear the glasses,’ ” he said.

“See, in my community violence is a form of currency,” he continued. “It’s not about if you are violent, it’s about if people buy into the idea that you may be violent. They’ll treat you a certain way.

“In middle-class communities, intelligence is the same thing,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you are intelligent, if people think you’re intelligent you’ll be treated with certain reverence because of it. Once I started to pick that up, I was like, ‘Right. O.K. I can see how I would navigate over here.’ ”

These days, he is busy raising two young children with his partner, Becci Wallace. As he grows older, he accepts that his views will change, and he says that is a good thing. Too often, he said, people are reluctant to admit they are wrong, to save face. “It’s much easier to see the holes in another person’s story than it is to get honest about the yarns you’ve been spinning.”

When it comes to politics and activism, “we think that if we condemn someone hard enough, maybe they’ll just humble themselves and admit that they’re wrong,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: British Rapper Translates Resentment to the Upper Classes. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe